TrackPerformer

TrackPerformer provides a visual stage for your music, using HTML5 canvas and audio. On that stage, performers “play” the instruments in the music visually. In other words, it’s a visualisation system for music, but based on the notation (the abstract) rather than the audio (the manifestation).

Essentially, you take a piece of music, convert it into a format that TrackPerformer understands (JSON), describe how you want it to be performed, and then watch! You can, of course, write your own performers.

Before going any further, let’s see it in action. The music is “Colony”, a new piece that I wrote about a week ago.

Note: You won’t be able to view the performance linked above in Internet Explorer, due to its over-aggressive script-blocking: the scripts served from GitHub have the wrong mime-type, so IE won’t let them run.

Take a look at the project on GitHub to see how it all fits together. TrackPerformer itself resides in the “Source” directory; in “Examples”, you’ll find the performance of Colony; in “Utilities”, there’s a JavaScript macro for Komodo IDE/Edit that will help you to translate copied-and-pasted OpenMPT pattern data into TrackPerformer’s JSON format.

You can find more information on the TrackPerformer wiki, including an outline of the format, and some basic instructions for getting started. I’ll be adding more information to the wiki over the next few days, and I’ll post updates here too.